Interior Design brainstorming?

[squiddles]

We are slowly but surely finishing our basement... it is such a mess right now... but I have so many visions of what it could be!!!

I cannot decide on paint colors though... and I can't decide whether or not to pain the wood paneling! We need to paint the walls and a bank of cabinets.
Anybody want to throw out some ideas?
The biggest need for me is to make it much lighter and brighter! It has a glass slider and a window, but not much natural light.
These are the colors I need to work with, once we put laminate flooring in, the rug will stay so I guess the walls should be able to go with that, as well as the stones on the fireplace...
I feel like the wood paneling really limits me if I leave it... i'd like to paint it.. but not sure if that's a design faux pas?
Here is my pinterest board for the basement
It will be where we store homeschool supplies and as the kids get older a place for them to study... also has the couch/TV/piano and is the in/out for the backyard.
blech, forgive the dirty dirty carpet and all the junk in the picture!! right now it's my DH's "man cave" but I will be reclaiming it soon!!

[charla]

Many of the rooms in our house are paneling and I hated it so we painted over it and it made it nice and bright and clean looking. I love it. You do have to use good paint to cover the dark lines in the paneling and we had to use a paint brush on each line to really get the paint in there and roll the rest. We didn't use a primer but I would highly recommend it or a paint and primer in one. I have seen some of the HGTV designers paint over paneling so I don't think it would be a big design faux pas. Much cheaper than tearing out the paneling and sheet rocking.